The Armed are mad as hell, they usually’re not going to take it anymore. After a loosely linked three-album cycle exploring the outer limits of hardcore punk, excessive pop, and the concept of “authenticity,” the cultish, semi-anonymous Detroit collective’s sixth album dispenses with high-concept experiments in favor of one thing extra fast. Built round a barrage of blast beats, dissonant guitars, and feral vocal outbursts, THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED is billed as a spasmodic response to dehumanization and catastrophe. And when it sticks to that first-thought philosophy, it’s an exciting success.
The appropriately pithy press launch that accompanied the album’s announcement located it as an “unfiltered expression of Weltschmerz,” a German phrase for the melancholy that units in when the world as it’s, with all its struggling and distress, can’t match our beliefs. Ours is a planet of trash fires and overtourism, balanced on the precipice of mass destruction; we have now round the clock entry to livestreams of state-sanctioned mass homicide, interrupted by advertising pablum and trip selfies. “Cheap shit/Fake fame/Dead kids/New gains,” lead vocalist Tony Wolski screams on “A More Perfect Design.” Trying to metabolize that poison isn’t human. It’s higher, the Armed suggest, to snap. So the album begins with Wolski screeching the apocalypse—“FOOLS! LIARS! HEATHENS! TRAITORS! REPENT! BE SAVED! JUDGMENT IS COMING!”—and maintains that life-or-death power for so long as attainable.
In these moments, bloody-throated and wide-eyed, the Armed actually do sound important. This is unvarnished insanity, a person waving his arms on the road nook and imploring Saturday-morning consumers to see the sunshine. “Kingbreaker” begins with a desert rock swagger however beefs up right into a half-speed breakdown with Wolski wailing, feral and adrenal: “My only friends are fucking scum…/In the noise we are all just ghosts.” On the frantic “Gave Up,” issues sluggish to a heavyweight tempo once more for him to howl “so hollowed out” whereas incongruously melodic background comfort (“But never alone”) is all however buried by the noise. These brutal breakdowns are completely distributed throughout the album, like monumental fluorescent signposts on a dimly lit highway.
The bother with state-of-the-union albums is that they typically come off as didactic, and the Armed do clip the sides of that minefield often. Looking round at a world filled with straw males on “Broken Mirror,” Wolski disdainfully lists them off one after the other: “These Yacht Club Socialists/These Patriot Grifters/Patriot psalm and their cure-all elixirs/These Anti-Christ Christians sure look more like demons.” It has the tone of the KLF and the Bush-era archetypes of American Idiot, which leaves the track in the midst of nowhere. Still, constructing these caricatures into one thing extra like characters produces a number of the album’s greatest moments. The detestable and judgmental antagonist of “Purity Drag”—“Nothing is my fault/I am divine”—is a worthy goal, pushed to the purpose of absurdity with their delusions of divinity. “Local Millionaire,” a molten rock track that would virtually garner radio play, has a equally one-dimensonal and (deliberately) self-important narrator who may simply develop into tiresome, however the voice shifts on the final second, ending with a viciously articulated “go fuck yourself” that pushes the monitor away from mimicry and again towards satisfying, knee-jerk fury.